Samenvatting

Mentoring dialogues play an important role in the supervision of prospective teachers. Mentor teachers have the dual role of guiding the students in the workplace and of stimulating students to reflect and learn from their teaching experiences. Does this happen in practice? This study describes the supervisory behavior of mentor teachers during their mentoring dialogues with prospective teachers by analysing 4 aspects of the dialogue: content, mentor teachers' role, the phases and time. There were three phases in the analysis of the literature. The results indicate that while teachers are effective in the guidance of prospective teachers in the workplace, they are not so effective in the area of stimulating reflection in the prospective teacher. In the mentoring dialogues it is usually the mentor teacher who is the dominant interlocutor; raising issues of organization, directing the prospective teacher in a prescriptive manner, deciding the content of the dialogue, not structuring the dialogue in phases and doing most of the talking. However, studies in this area vary greatly in the presentation of the issues and offer little coherence or correlation. So after looking at the literature, we propose a model where the roles of the mentor teachers can be catagorised and where the data collected can be correlated with the existing literature.